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If you spend any time at all surfing the Web, then you probably have seen adverts for free, lifetime e-mail accounts.

 In most cases, these services are offered entirely via the Web.

 Using special software, they enable you to read, write and manage your mail from anywhere where you have access to the Web.

 The companies generally finance their services by selling advertisements on the sites. This enables them to offer the accounts free.

 The number of Web-based e-mail providers is growing, with the more famous, such as HotMail, sitting next to newer, or less familiar services, such as MailCity and RocketMail.

 HotMail (www.hot mail.com): The most popular free e-mail service in the world with 9.5 million users, HotMail was bought at the beginning of the year by Microsoft.

 Though only two years old, it had established itself as 'the' name that many people immediately associate with free, Web-based e-mail accounts.

 This fame comes with good reason. Its system is relatively fast, offers decent automatic filtering of incoming mail, multiple folders to sort your mail and a clear interface, even if it can be a bit cramped on smaller screens.

 On top of this, with HotMail you can automatically subscribe to a variety of e-mail-based news and information services allowing you to use your account as a way to receive daily news and information without cluttering any other e-mail accounts that you use.

 A nice feature of HotMail is that you can download your mail from up to four e-mail addresses (also known as POP3 mail accounts) into your HotMail account.

 This can consolidate many different inboxes in one place.

 HotMail also allows you to create a personal signature which will be appended at the end of all the messages you send.

 HotMail includes a spell-checker, dictionary and thesaurus for when users are composing messages.

 While these features are not as fast as those available on software such as Microsoft Word (as the text must be sent to the HotMail server for checking), they do work.

 MailCity (www.mail city.com): At first glance, MailCity seems similar to HotMail.

 There are versions with and without frames, you get an address book and a signature, folders and more.

 In fact, the mail interface is surprisingly similar to HotMail's, although the overall arrangement of the frames differs.

 However, MailCity offers additional useful features not found in HotMail and some other services.

 For instance, users of MailCity can set up automatic vacation notices for when they are unable to read their mail.

 Like HotMail, MailCity offers attachments - increasingly useful in today's multimedia computing environment.

 On the down side, MailCity's filtering (called Controls) is a little more limited than HotMail's or Yahoo! Mail's.

 It allows blocking of incoming messages on the basis of e-mail address but does not provide the finer filtering controls of HotMail.

 Nor does MailCity offer the thesaurus and spelling features.

 Still, MailCity is equally intuitive. It is also free and includes the same intrusive, but necessary, adverts as HotMail.

 Yahoo! Mail (mail.yahoo.com): Yahoo! Mail combines the Four11 e-mail directory service and the venerable Yahoo! in an e-mail joint endeavour.

 The advantage of this partnership is that the system's integrated address book offers you access to the complete Four11 directory - useful for those obscure addresses you sometimes need to find.

 There are limitations to Yahoo! Mail. However, it also sports some impressive features, even if it lacks HotMail's innovative thesaurus.

  Yahoo! Mail is the best designed of the services considered here. Adverts are less imposing and the interface is not cluttered in the way that HotMail and MailCity appear at times.

 NetAddress (netad dress.usa.net): Of all the services covered here, NetAddress has probably done the best job of graphic design.

 Aside from this surface judgment, NetAddress has a few unique features which set it apart from the crowd.

 For example, you can use standard POP mail software such as Netscape Mail or Eudora to read your NetAddress account, something not offered by all the Web-based mail services.

 The advantage of this is that you can use a powerful mail package at home or in the office and only move to Web-based e-mail, which is less convenient, when you are away from your normal workstation.

 Other useful features include The Hot Wire, an on-screen news display, and The Dispatch, an e-mail editorial content service providing information from The Los Angeles Times , among other publications.

 At a more technical level, NetAddress offers most of the features you would expect to see in a Web-based e-mail service including folders, an address book and filters.

 Some useful features include a scheduling tool whereby NetAddress's system can send you e-mail reminders of important dates, and a history feature which keeps a historical summary of incoming mail by date, sender and subject.

 Of course, there are limitations. NetAddress has no spell-checker and I was unable to find any type of signature feature. Still, other filters are well implemented.

 NetAddress' filters, for instance, offer more flexibility and more actions (including forwarding to another account) than most other Web e-mail services.



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